Food Record

List of Various Foods from the Trip

 This was a spinach and feta cheese pancake with mashed potatoes and tomatoes, with a caramel pudding for dessert. I thought the pancake was quite unique, and certainly different, but it tasted pretty good.

This is Topfenknödel, a stuffed curd cheese dumpling, here served with vanilla sauce. I absolutely loved this dessert. They never specified what was in the dumpling, though I suspect it was strawberries.

This was some of the food served at the Saarland BBQ. I personally preferred the grilled pork over the wurst. The potatoes tasted great of course, and the grilled cheese tomatoes were enjoyable as well.

Some ice cream in a cute glass, with strawberries, whipped cream and a wafer. Honestly, I'm mostly just in love with the glass. 

Some delicious nutella ice cream from Saarbrüken. It's those cheap desserts that always satisfy best.

A sort of blueberry custard tart I bought from a shop in Saarbrüken. Really should have wrote down the name. Unlike in the USA, where we insist on putting sugar in, this was certainly, well, tart in flavor. That taste was perfect though, and not something against it.  

Ice cream in the same interesting container, this time with chocolate sauce and pears with the vanilla ice cream, wafer, and whipped cream. The pears came as a nice surprise- I had no idea that they were in there!

Eating Chinese food in Germany- certainly not something that I expected to be doing. We got to eat some delicious duck, some noodles, and the largest spring rolls I have ever seen/ eaten. It all tasted pretty good. 

This I found interesting- the meat was Schnitzel, with green beans, mac & cheese, and fries. I found it amusing because though the first three were done quite fancy and home-made style, the fries were similar to store-bought ones. All tasted great, I just couldn't help but chuckle at the contrast.

I was quite happy when this meal- it's all french-based! They had quiche lorraine, which I love, and tarte flambée, one of the best dishes ever created. It's from the region of Alsace, and is more of a cheese bread with slight similarities to pizza. Only a thousand times better. Finally they had profiteroles for dessert, which are basically éclairs made into balls and covered in chocolate sauce. Overall, incredibly delicious. 

This was traditional Bavarian food. I had cold roast beef, Semmelknödel, bread dumplings, Sauerkraut, potoatoes, and some sour cream and meat-like patty. I actually enjoyed it (I feared I might not). However, none of it compared to the dessert. 

This was the dessert for the traditional Bavarian meal- Bavarian cream and what I'm dubbing "pretzel bread" (I'm sure the official name is something else but I can't seem to remember it.) In my opinion, Bavarian cream is something along the lines of if ice cream met butter. I also had the idea  (which is others found weird) to put it on the bread. But it tasted pretty great like that!

This was from when we had Italian for dinner. There was, of course, pasta with marinara sauce, some tomatoes and cheese, salad, and finally vegetarian pizza buns. Thoroughly enjoyed all of it. 

For lunch this day, as the entrée, we had turkey schnitzel, green beans, and cut up potato... niblets? I don't know what they are actually called. Great way to appeal to Americans.

Okay, I did not enjoy this dessert at all. Unlike my peers, who couldn't stand the taste, which I found acceptable,  I could not stand the texture of the pudding. Pryce told me it was made of corn meal-like stuff, which I could tell. However, that was not the problem. The problem was the sorta vanilla taste/ sweet taste with the texture of grits! My brain had a weird crisis and ended up rejecting it- it couldn't handle the confusion. 

Some incredibly good wurst, sauerkraut, and mashed potatoes. The mashed potatoes though were oddly similar to grits. 

A really larger döner kebab I had in the traditionally Turkish district of Berlin, Kreuzberg.

Different Products

Day in Saarbrüken

German 100 Homework

The assignment was to find three products that one couldn't buy in the USA

Now, I know Vodafone might seem like a weird choice, but I picked it because I feel like it illustrates still how even in this global economy there are still differences even with more modern products, like with social media.

This may seem like a kindle, but I can assure you it isn't, or at least not in the way one from the USA would expect. For one this one has a different name, and second this one is about as big as an iphone 5s. As a result I found it quite unusual.

Finally, this is some sort of tea from a pharmacy, called an apothecary in Germany. I took a picture of this not only for the homework but to also remind me about how different overall the pharmacy was. It was quite large, impeccable in design and cleanliness, and kept itself well organized. The only thing Rite Aid might even come close to having on this store was that Rite Aid also serves as a convenience store, which even that might be debatable as a benefit or not. 

Signs

Signs

 German 100 Homework

The assignment was to take five pictures of things with German words on them that we were in some way interested in

While I understand most of it, I was curious about shräg. I also thought the symbol arrangement was interesting

Honestly, this sign is quite cute

Pretty sure there's an English equivalent in terms of style, for those local restaurants

I think this might be a pet store from the photos, thought the font doesn't suggest it (it reminds me of a font for a store related to mechanics and fixing things

cute cafe sign

The Abbey in Tholey and Sustainability

Learning Culture

On Day 2

When we first arrived in Saarland, at the academie, often Mr. Matern talked about sustainability and its value. At first I though the academie valued sustainability in relation to the movements it seemed to be influenced on (or what I believed it to be from observation) mainly from the Bauhaus movement by Walter Gropius from the Weimar Republic era, which focused on creating a space focused on function and simple designs. When our group visited the Benedictine Abbey in Tholey though and had a tour led by a resident monk I realized that sustainability is actually a German cultural value on the whole. I realized this particularly with all the talk on conserving heat during Vespers by holding it in the small Baroque room to the side, with how the lights soon turn off after people left, and with the talk of the gold leaf bulbs on an art structure at the top of the side tower for the stairs that reflected the light from inside. Apparently people often would mistake the bulbs for light bulb and would receive some questioning and some judgement as a result. It was quite the revelation on how central the value on sustainability is here. This was only accentuated with additional habits mentioned by the professors later. I find it quite interesting how the importance of the subject is not just in relation to the recent movement with "green", as in against global warming and climate change. Instead sustainability can be traced to after WWII apparently and with the need to conserve and reuse sparse resources. I wonder if the value of sustainability goes back even further?